


Salt in his Bones -- a Fairytale

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, M/M, also there's some Davy Jones influence???, get it -- Jones like Alfred F Jones ahahaha, or are they????, pirates!, they are also human, tw -- blood and bad jokes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-15
Updated: 2013-11-15
Packaged: 2018-01-01 15:20:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1045480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur was cursed when he was a young man, because way back when he’d stood in the middle of a sweaty pub and told a witch right off.  He’d swayed like a compass needle and spilled a mug of beer down his ratty jacket.  It hardly matters now what he’d yelled at her for, simply that she decided she liked him an awful lot.   She smoothed down his hair with sour, waterlogged palms and pressed her swollen drowned-girl’s mouth to his forehead.  Whatever he had blurted out –whoever he’d socked in the face, whatever he’d blamed for the ache in his head –it couldn’t have been worth what she said next.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Salt in his Bones -- a Fairytale

Arthur was cursed when he was a young man, because way back when he’d stood in the middle of a sweaty pub and told a witch right off. He’d swayed like a compass needle and spilled a mug of beer down his ratty jacket. It hardly matters now what he’d yelled at her for, simply that she decided she liked him an awful lot. She smoothed down his hair with sour, waterlogged palms and pressed her swollen drowned-girl’s mouth to his forehead. Whatever he had blurted out –whoever he’d socked in the face, whatever he’d blamed for the ache in his head –it couldn’t have been worth what she said next. 

She said she had come from the belly of the sea, and he belonged to her, now. She said he couldn’t creep too far away from her cold, shivering fingers – those searching tendrils of wet upon the sand – or his bones would turn into clumps of salt, crumbling beneath his skin. 

He could walk on many shores, dip his toes in many towns, but if he could not see the ocean’s shimmering back, if he could not smell her searing salt-breath on the wind, then he would fold in on himself. Doctors would cut him open to find blood and salt mixed together inside. 

It was a real enough curse. As soon as the witch had spoken it Arthur coughed and sputtered; he hacked up handfuls of red-stained salt. His blood tasted like the sea in his mouth. The witch told him he’d better hurry, better run away back to his boat. And he did, oh he did, scurrying off in his worn-out borrowed boots, tumbling over his feet, catching himself on the cobblestones. His throat bled, his hands bled and oh dear lord his feet were sore. 

Arthur lived many years on the sea. He’d started as a merchant sailor, a few pennies to his name and an old brown hat. He sailed under a string of captains, each barnacle-crusted and curt as the next, each with hair so stained with salt it might never be clean again. He lay curled up tight in a few sailors’ arms, but none of them managed to scrub the feeling of that soggy witch’s kiss from his forehead. 

Finally, drunk at this one port with a quick name that sounded like a cough or a splutter, Arthur signed on with a pirate crew. They promised him money and distant lands; his brain was a blur, and he could imagine himself tying rope and hauling cargo for the same merchant crews forever, into eternity, until he was crooked and grey. His hands would be knobby and he’d die alone. He decided to pile mounds of blood-smeared gems and twinkling golden coins around him, wrapping him up safely. He would make something of himself, something terrifying and grand. 

Arthur decided to wear velvet coats in purple and red, and he exchanged his old brown hat for one with gaudy feathers and brooches like ladies wore on their dress fronts in those days. He decided to shave his beard and smile at people before he killed them. He did this for many years, his heavy black flag like a gash across the blue sky, letting the nighttime spill in from behind. His ship was quick, his figurehead screaming. The witch below quaked with laughter. Her freezing fingers sometimes slithered through cracks in Arthur’s wooden hull, smearing themselves along his boots, soaking into his mattress as he slept at night. 

He never felt clean; he was always salty. Everyone on the ocean knew to fear him. 

Alfred was not from the ocean; he wasn’t even from the shores Arthur knew, and he had traveled far and long. Arthur had cupped his gold-dusted hands around half the world’s seas, and still Alfred managed to surprise him. He came onboard sometime in the summer. No one knew precisely when. He claimed to have sailed with many fine captains, though of course he didn’t know a one of them. He could tie knots, though, and scale the rigging faster than anyone else on that sleek, sharp boat. 

That was why Arthur wound up speaking to him alone. He intended to teach him where to find their fearsome flag so that he could hoist it before battle. Alfred was so very quick, after all, and his eyes grew cold before a fight. His plump, boyish cheeks became inconsequential as soon as he drew steel. Alfred was hunched over himself in the barracks below; the air smelled of piss and rum, a heavy, dank smell that meant “home.” It meant bunks that shook and lurched with every wave. Alfred’s hair was plastered to his forehead; his hands were blistered and oozing, his skin scorched red by the sun. 

Arthur paused. He chuckled. He said, “You aren’t a sailor, boy.” 

Alfred argued, like a dog barking at a thing he could never catch. In the end he swallowed hard and said, “No, I’m not.” 

Before the ropes tore and ground them away, Alfred’s hands had been broad and soft, the sort that could smooth down cheeks and would surely stroke hair in the darkness. He was a nobleman’s son, Arthur guessed, practically a stowaway, a self-entitled vagabond bounding from the lap of luxury because he thought it might be _romantic._ Alfred said he was right. 

He was almost right, anyway. Alfred’s father had been an inventor who made it big, who hoisted himself up by his oily bootstraps before Al was even born. He was to be married to a nobleman’s son, though, sent off to a land that still had a king, given away like a piece of property. “My father wasn’t a part of the game, before,” Alfred said, “But he is now. The money matters to him, and I will not be his money.” 

Or, that’s the gist of what he said, anyway – perhaps Arthur made it sound prettier in his head later on. There was nothing wrong with a little romance in the world. This was a plot scooped from the pages of one of Arthur’s old novels, the ones piled in his chambers with water-warped pages and covers that sometimes grew moldy. 

The longer Arthur looked at Alfred’s face, the brighter it seemed. Al’s eyes were dry as he told about his father assuring him they would all have to resign themselves to this game of marriage and estates in the end. Alfred said, “You can give in, or you can fight. People should have a choice. People always have a choice.” 

Arthur noticed that his eyes were the blue of the sky, which is nothing like the blue of the sea when you really get down to it. He noticed that he was older than he looked. Alfred knew how to read and could name too many of the stars. 

At first he sailed as a crewman, hoisting the black flag before every battle and trading his sword out for a gun – he was one of many going barefoot. Soon Alfred’s hands were worn and crisscrossed with scars; his skin was dark and rough. His eyes were always like the sky, and Arthur began calling him to his cabin, pouring liquor down his throat, telling him stories. At first Alfred listened and ate what was given to him. He smiled uncomfortably and nodded too often, brows furrowed. Arthur would raise his voice and throw his arms around. He let himself remember the bold man who had spilled beer on himself and cussed out the ocean’s witch for all to see. There was a merry hunger in his smile. He waited for Alfred to tell him stories, too. 

Finally Alfred said, “You shouldn’t treat me special. I’m just one of your men.” 

It wasn’t like the men Arthur had known to turn down little luxuries; it wasn’t like a pirate to avoid expensive meats and colored glass bottles of drink. “You don’t like fancy food?” 

“Hell no. I love it.” 

“Then you don’t like talking to me?” 

“Nah. I can stand talking to you. You’re not so bad,” said Alfred. He grinned right before Arthur got upset – he was kidding. Sometimes it felt like he was always just kidding. 

“Then what’s wrong?” Arthur tried to be annoyed, but it was somehow difficult. 

“It’s just not fair,” Alfred said. He waited in the doorway a while, and Arthur sent him away. Then he imagined himself tangled in Alfred’s long, soft limbs, their sheets caked in salt, their breathing low and deep and hot. He composed arguments in his head about how just being a pirate was advocating injustice, robbery, villainy. The longer he spent composing those arguments the quieter he became, and the more his crew whispered. 

He thought of how Alfred had refused to be treated like money. He was more than money, wasn’t he? A flesh-and-blood man. Arthur was surrounded by coins that clattered together like tinny voices, clear glass animals with ruby eyes that could move on their own, intricate weapons crafted of gold and mirror and platinum... He was surrounded by wealth, but nothing that mattered to him could bleed but his own self. 

Alfred wasn’t from the ocean, but Arthur made him his first mate. He came to his cabin far more often after that. Sometimes he even came on his own, with a wicked twinkle in his eye, with a little prank to play, with a confession. He told Arthur he loved him, and Arthur said that was very good news indeed. He couldn’t believe how warm Alfred’s lips were on his forehead. Al talked about going back to his father, showing him he’d been married at sea. They could live among fields of brittle corn, beneath a sky the size of infinity. Arthur said that sounded lovely, like a pretty little dream, but he never married Alfred. He told him many stories, but he never told him the one about the witch, about how his bones could shatter into handfuls of salt. 

Alfred never knew to bring it up, though he asked him about everything else. 

“What’s your real name?” he asked, one night. 

“Arthur, of course. And isn’t yours Alfred?” 

“Yeah. I guess we’re not the most creative pirates out there.” Bloody Lizzie was said to have taken out the _Edelweiss’s_ previous captain, known only as “the Knight,” with a frying pan. A man named Matthias had gone by the Red Ax for years before he was taken out, supposedly by his brother’s witchcraft. 

“I’m shocked you’re a pirate at all.” Arthur chuckled grimly, low in his throat. Sometimes Alfred told him his laughter sounded a little more like a happy grumble, as opposed to his usual sullen-type grumble. Ah, well. 

“So am I, sometimes,” Alfred answered. “It’s not what I wanted.” 

Another night Alfred asked where Arthur had grown up; he asked whether he liked dogs. He asked whether he would like to hear him rattle off the names of constellations, and even though Arthur said no Alfred went ahead and did it anyway. 

“You’re an ass,” Arthur told him. 

Alfred smirked. “So are you.” 

One night, ships came from Arthur’s old homeland, the king’s brazen ships in red and gold, flying milky white sails the color of blinded eyes. They came without a sound, with shackles and judges already onboard. They would cart the crew off to clammy prisons with a thousand notches already carved on all the walls, leave them waiting there to rot. In other lands there would have been crowds ready and waiting to sling nooses around their necks, but this king considered himself kind. He _was_ kind. He would take the pirates deep into his kingdom, where trees were thick and birds fluttered between them. Farmlands would sprawl like a patchwork quilt spread out on the ground, like the world was getting ready for a picnic. 

Arthur knew he would choke on his own crumbling bones, gag on a stomach full of blood. When he woke in the night, when he saw those ships, he rallied his men to battle. 

This was not the first time they’d fought the king’s men in all their many years on the sea, but it was, by crafty chance, the first time they had lost. They roared and thrashed, but in the end they were dragged from the ocean’s back. 

Arthur himself dove deep. He threw himself off the ship’s gilded railings and tumbled down into the sea witch’s arms. Her breath was in all the bubbles, her movement in every flicker of light sneaking in from above. Arthur waited with her, hating her, _needing_ her, until the king’s ships went away. 

Everything in him had been afraid of falling apart, after all. He hadn’t known he was the kind of man who could give himself up with grace. 

When Arthur swam back to the surface, though, the dawn was bleeding out over the sea, the sun a dying animal that nothing could save. His ship was splintered, hollowed-out and empty, bobbing around like a child’s toy left afloat in the bathtub. Part of it had been burned up. It was full of ghost-voices. Alfred had left behind his faded star-map, his boots; he had stumbled from bed half-blind with sleep. Arthur could imagine the way the soldiers’ bonds would slice his wrists, his ankles. He knew Alfred would have never asked for mercy. 

Maybe he could gather a new crew, plucked from sticky tavern floors and wrestled from the stockades. Maybe. 

He didn’t. 

Arthur hadn’t thought about much of anything when he’d decided to chew out that witch so long ago. He didn’t think of anything at all, now. Later he would realize guilt and fear, but by then it wouldn’t matter. He took control of his own ship before the soldiers could come back for her, before they could pierce her belly and let the gold coins spill out. He and that bitter, screaming figurehead sailed off for his homeland, where sheep outnumbered men, where the hills were such a perfect green they might have been painted. Back to fields of blue flowers. Back to the prisons. 

Of course the soldiers turned around, ready to drag his ship in for the slaughter, but Arthur had outwitted them before. His crew had been beside him, then, and now it took all he had to drag the sails up the mast alone, to keep the ropes tight and untangled, the ship heading in the right direction. He swerved far off course so no one could see him. He wound his way back to familiar shores as carefully as he could. He wore his old brown hat again, the one without any feathers. 

You may ask how he managed, how he survived. You may ask what he ate. He hasn’t told anyone since, so I’m afraid we must both wonder together. 

Arthur came onshore somewhere sleazy enough to welcome him, and he traded his nicest coats for stolen soldiers’ clothes. Medals someone else earned were pinned to his chest, then, and he stared at the sea for a long, frightened while. His eyes burned. In another life, perhaps he had joined the navy. 

It was difficult to walk on solid ground, now, without timbers groaning beneath him, without fathoms of cold wet shifting the world under his feet. He went back onto his ship three times, shivering, before he decided to brave the roads. 

Arthur handed over a necklace strung with jeweled butterfly wings for a ride in someone’s aching carriage. He tried to sleep. The coach rocked, and that was comforting. Every time he managed to drift away even a little he would wake himself up gagging on salt. Soon enough he couldn’t use his right arm; it was a sack of meat with nothing _strong_ left inside. If he squished his fingers into it they could feel almost all the way through with no bones there to stop them. Then he lost one of his feet. He was tempted to cut it off so the salt would spill out across the carriage floor and he’d be rid of a sorry dead weight, but he hesitated when he realized he’d have to bind the wound. 

He would find Alfred, he told himself, and Alfred would drag him back to the sea. His bones would harden and easy breaths would come again. 

It was like he was drowning, sometimes, but Arthur just spat his blood out the window so it splattered on the roads, the wheels. Now and again he felt the witch threading her arms around his shoulders and he’d try to quiver away, but she was never there, not really. He was riding too far away from her, ever farther. Soon his skull would cave in, salt ground into the wrinkles of his brain. He could feel it happening. He was getting funny, now, his mind was getting funny and when he laughed it felt like waves crashing deep inside his chest. 

He wished he could remember what he’d said to the witch that made her love him so. 

He traveled a long while. He traveled much too far. 

Eventually the man who drove the coach asked for another necklace, a few fingerfuls of rings to wear. Anything. Arthur couldn’t understand him, so he told him about stars. 

He was tossed onto the side of the road and told, “Sorry,” or something else that meant nothing. 

He was found, though he didn’t realize it; he was taken to prison, though it felt like falling deeper and deeper down a well, with the world just getting a little darker, a little colder. When he was put in the cell, he’d already lost his spine. He didn’t have to attend his own trial, which was all the same, in the end. He tried and tried to see the ceiling in his room, but he couldn’t. It was alright, he told himself. He tried to be angry, but there was nothing in him but water and salt, a stagnant little sea without anything living inside. That was alright, too. 

The man who came for him wasn’t Alfred, though he looked like him. Shorter, with ashy skin and yellow teeth – he was a rich man, but Arthur later saw there was dirt under his fingernails. He called to someone behind him. He said, “Here’s a sorry son of a bitch,” and “He doesn’t look like much, does he?” His men wore uniforms, but they weren’t from the right kingdom – they weren’t from a kingdom at all, but Arthur couldn’t know that. They hefted Arthur up and took him into the rich man’s carriage. He made the whole place stink like the sea. 

“Bastard’s dead,” one of them said. 

“He isn’t,” said another. 

“No use taking him to the young master now.” 

“Sure there is,” Alfred’s father said. “He told us they were married at sea. Alliances aren’t worth shit if your son is already married. Damndest thing.” 

Then Arthur didn’t know anything for a while. 

The ocean’s witch came to him as he was sleeping – she came when the creak of the carriage’s wheels became like shrieking of sea birds, or when rivers snuck through the rocks. She moaned, “Why did you leave me?” and, “Why have you been away so long?” She snickered, and her laughter had something of the darkest seas in it, where creatures are sightless and everything hurts. She was so beautiful, waterlogged and dripping on the rich man’s satin pillows. 

“You’re crumbling,” she told him. 

He agreed. 

“So why did you never come back? It hurt. Oh, stupid man, it must have hurt.” 

Of course it did. 

“But you didn’t turn around?” 

They took him. 

“And I took your bones.” 

No. 

No, he realized she hadn’t. The curse was real enough, as curses went, but she hadn’t taken anything away. She could change him, but could she _take_ him? 

Perhaps it was then, rattling away over a countryside he’d forgotten, that Arthur realized nothing could take him away from himself. 

He didn’t belong to her. She was from the belly of the sea, and he was far too human, far too warm, born of blood and breath and screaming – she could never own him. You can give in, or you can fight. People always have a choice. 

Tendrils of water thread their way up the beach every day, seeping into the sand, stretching as far as they can up and up and into our world. They always fall away. The ocean’s witch brushed her shriveled lips against Arthur’s hair, against the gory smudge that had been his mouth. Then she was gone. 

Alfred’s father had covered Arthur’s face – “Damn pirate,” – when he’d hefted him into the carriage. Of course it was Alfred who lifted the stained old handkerchief, and when he smiled it was like the sun fighting its way back over the heartless curvature of the earth. He was a little battered, a little thinner. He was so warm. 

“Yeah, it’s him,” he told his father. 

“Well, take him home, then,” his father laughed. “You little shit.” 

And that’s exactly what Alfred did. He said, later, that he could always taste a little salt in Arthur’s kisses. Arthur said that was nonsense and scrubbed away at his mouth with the back of his hand. 

After that, history sort of misplaced the both of them. Some say they went back to piracy, going by nefarious new names and bickering together as they gut open their foes on the deck. Others say they never went near the sea again. 

Some say Alfred dueled the sea witch and when he shot her head she dissolved into the sickly yellowish foam that floats on sour-smelling waves. Others say Arthur just made a point of avoiding bar fights, except when absolutely necessary. 

I suppose we’ll never know for sure, will we?

**Author's Note:**

> you may have been wondering about the 2p America tag. where was 2p America? was this a cunning deception? no, it wasn't -- Alfred's dad here is 2p America as I envision him. his name is Allen. he will actually have his proper name attached in other stories. 
> 
> also, Denmark, Norway, Hungary and Prussia are all mentioned here, too. I didn't think their appearances were large enough to warrant a tag... but there you go. there they are. behold the terror of the Red Ax and his fiendish skills as a salesman. 
> 
> that's all, I guess.
> 
> thank you for reading~~~ <3


End file.
